Several papers have proposed that the grading system affects students' incentives to exert effort. In particular, the previous literature has compared student effort under relative and absolute grading systems, but the results are mixed and the implications of the models have not been empirically tested. In this paper, I build a model where…

Like scientists, children seek ways to explain causal systems in the world. But are children scientists in the strict Bayesian tradition of maximizing posterior probability? Or do they attend to other explanatory considerations, as laypeople and scientists--such as Einstein--do? Four experiments support the latter possibility. In particular, we…

The family environment shapes children's social information processing and emotion regulation. Yet, the long-term effects of early family systems have rarely been studied. This study investigated how family system types predict children's attentional biases toward facial expressions at the age of 10 years. The participants were 79 children from…

The co-occurrence of psychotic and autism spectrum disorder (ASD) symptoms represents an important clinical challenge. Here we consider this problem in the context of a computational psychiatry approach that has been applied to both conditions--predictive coding. Some symptoms of schizophrenia have been explained in terms of a failure of top-down…

Do properties of a word's features influence the order of its acquisition in early word learning? Combining the principles of mutual exclusivity and shape bias, the present work takes a network analysis approach to understanding how feature distinctiveness predicts the order of early word learning. Distance networks were built from nouns with edge…

The updating of a memory is triggered whenever it is reactivated and a mismatch from what is expected (i.e., prediction error) is detected, a process that can be unraveled through the memory's sensitivity to protein synthesis inhibitors (i.e., reconsolidation). As noted in previous studies, in Pavlovian threat/aversive conditioning in adult rats,…

Today's superintendents face increasingly non-routine and complex problems that are educational, managerial, and political in nature. This study investigated occupational stressors and job satisfaction of school superintendents in Pennsylvania. This was accomplished through self-report of superintendents and through the perspective of school board…

We propose a model that employs convolutional neural networks (CNN) to evaluate sociomoral reasoning maturity, a key social ability, necessary for adaptive social functioning. Our model is used in a serious game to evaluate learners. It uses pre-annotated textual data (verbatims) and a coding scheme (SoMoral) applied by experts in psychology.…

In this paper, we investigate two purported problems with Bayesian Knowledge Tracing (BKT), a popular statistical model of student learning: "identifiability" and "semantic model degeneracy." In 2007, Beck and Chang stated that BKT is susceptible to an "identifiability problem"--various models with different…

Does mothers' employment predict the subsequent maternal employment of their daughters? Social learning theory suggests that modeling should increase under more positive relationship conditions. We examined the congruence between mothers' maternal employment and daughters' maternal employment longitudinally across 4 periods of parenthood and as a…

The development of visual expertise is accompanied by enhanced visual object recognition memory within an expert domain. We aimed to understand the relationship between expertise and memory by modeling cognitive mechanisms. Participants with a measured range of birding expertise were recruited and tested on memory for birds (expert domain) and…

In past decades, researchers have conducted a myriad of masked priming lexical decision experiments aimed at unveiling the early processes underlying lexical access. A relatively overlooked question is whether a masked unrelated wordlike/unwordlike prime influences the processing of the target stimuli. If participants apply to the primes the same…

What does it mean to be a Muslim young woman in Britain today and with which religious and social values do these young women identify? This paper tests the thesis that Muslim identity predicts distinctive values of public and social significance among female adolescents (13- to 15- years of age) who participated in a survey conducted across the…

The role of metacognitive postdiction accuracy and autonomous and controlled motivation in mathematics was explored in elementary school children (n = 208) within two perspectives, related to sample characteristics. A first study was set up in a population-based cohort. A second study was set up with children with and without a documented…

Despite the crucial importance of teacher impact for a wide range of student and teacher outcomes, it is not clear whether any individual-level factors precede teacher passion and if so how. Drawing on self-regulation theory and the self-regulatory strength model, I propose a theoretical reciprocal model in which teachers' sleep quality predicts…